Stewart The Fox

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/b] "Stewart The Fox" is one of literally thousands of creatively bankrupt asset flips infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.[/quote] Some effort went into making a bunch of Unreal Marketplace assets into a third person platformer by dumping those assets onto a third person platformer Unreal game blueprint. Of course, all the parts that the assets and blueprint couldn't cover here are a train wreck. There's also AI slop in the game, which is absolutely disgusting and a sheer insult to gamers and to real developers everywhere. So, "Stewart The Fox" is partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Little, if anything in this game is the creation of the "developer". Of course it gets worse, it seems a number of game sound effects were stolen from other games, so that would be copyright infringment... for profit. That's illegal. While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Stewart The Fox", and this kind of asset flipping never results in games that have quality or value for PC gamers. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. The developer has their hand out for a $3 "donation"... digital panhandling, as he seeks to get YOUR money for a bunch of ripped off game assets and some AI Slop. This is absolutely not okay. The grift and cash grabbing keeps getting worse... this product is hooked into Steams "Totally not NFTs" Community Marketplace/Inventory, which means you can buy and sell and trade "tokens" (fungible ones in this case) for real world money, and you can "earn" these tokens by playing the game. This is never done with the interests of gamers in mind, the "developer" behind this gets paid for every trade, and has presumbly also farmed up a bunch of the items to sell on the market, too. This kind of Steam abuse, combined with a minimum-viable-product non-game, does no service to gamers whatsoever. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's well over 130 million gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict? Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off almost as much as the games the developer stole audio from.